Working With Sugar

It’s still one of the biggest barriers to CRM adoption – nobody likes typing in information if they don’t have to. It often takes more time than it should and is prone to human error. As a result, information gets locked away in silos such as ‘the inbox’, the ‘conference attendee list’ and the ‘drawer full of business cards’. Of course, this means that the business loses sight of these valuable prospects – just when a relationship was beginning to develop. Business Card Scanning Machines A few years ago, business card scanning machines were all the rage. Drop in a stack of business cards and the machine will churn out a comma separated file ready to import into your SugarCRM system. This is great in theory but in reality, companies rarely issue each and every employee a card scanner. Sales people won’t usually want to pass that stack of fresh business cards over to someone else to process after a successful conference exhibition. There must be an easier way to get business card information promptly into Sugar? There is and, as the saying goes, there’s an app for that. SugarCRM Business Card App I confess that even as a Sugar reseller and a big CRM evangelist, the one thing that really irks me about all CRM solutions is how long it takes to copy information from either a business card, a spreadsheet row or an email signature and turn it into a populated lead in the CRM. The amount of time wasted tabbing back and forth copying and pasting is ridiculous. If you’ve got 10,000 contact records in your CRM and it...[Read in Full]

Introduction SugarCRM provides a range of useful features to assist with marketing efforts, right out-of-the-box, all as part of your standard SugarCRM subscription. So, while it is certainly possible to link SugarCRM to a range of other third party mailing solutions (such as Pardot, Marketo, Pure360, MailChimp etc) it’s probably worth taking the time to have a detailed look at what you can achieve, free of any third party charges, with the application itself. I’m going to divide the features up into the following key areas: Email blasts Newsletters Web-to-Lead capture Marketing Automation Email Blasts SugarCRM will enable you to send rich, HTML based, email content to a large collection of people. It will let you define that target audience based on any segmentation criteria that you wish to use. The email content itself can contain: Fully styled HTML based content Personalised content Images Attachments Tracked links The system will not only dispatch the emails for you, but will also track how recipients engage – recording who views the email (and how many times), which links they click, whether they opt-out of further communication and so on. SugarCRM will automatically manage “opt-outs” for you, marking the email address as “opted out” and automatically supressing that email address in any further mailings, even if accidentally included in the target list. Finally, SugarCRM will monitor the return your campaign provides – not only in terms of “clicks and views” but in a far more tangible way – did it earn any money? Build rich HTML emails and track the outcome of your campaigns Because, as standard, every Lead, every Contact and...[Read in Full]